I am trying to repair a friends pc, he formatted his hd and i couldn't get anything to work, don't think he made a partition so i installed a hd i had that was working, i set cmos to autotype received following message, autotype failed, failure fixed disk o, and i get 2 short beeps. I powered down, inserted win98 startup disk and turned back on, goes to system info screen with all info, CPU 486sx2 50mhz coprocessor none, (im only putting part of info, trying to be short as possible) master 0 user, master 1 none, slave o &1 none, started with cd/rom support, and got, PCI read config failure, 98 drive c has no valid fat or fat32 partition, run fdisk, Diagnostic tools loaded to drive c device driver not found MSCD001 no valid CD rom device drivers selected, (cd rom is connected to a video card) a:/ I typed in at the prompt fdisk and receive the following message error reading fixed disk a:/ this is the same thing on both hd's Please help I dont know where to go from here thanks, sorry so long

Hmmmmm... Start with the basics. Check the drives' signal cables and see if they're installed correctly. It might be a backwards cable. Also check to see if the drives are jumpered correctly (master, slave stuff). How large are the drives? On a 486 system, really big drives over say 2Gig or so may require a BIOS update. Can you hear the drives spin up when you apply power? Do you get error messages on screen like "No fixed Disk Present" or "Fixed Disk Error?" It could be a lot of things. Keep us posted

Janet, >master 0 user... Did you enter the proper info into CMOS for this HD? >486sx2 50mhz... This motherboard obviously has an older BIOS that undoubtedly has HD size limitations. This may be the reason that AUTO Detect failed in CMOS setup with the newer HD. You'd probably be better off reinstalling the original HD & using it. Since the BIOS sees it as user(defined), the settings are probably OK. (The settings are probably still set for this HD). With the CD attached to the soundcard, You'll need to either find & install the correct drivers for this, or find another way to copy the Win9x directory onto the HD, such as slaving the HD temporarily into another PC which has a working CD.) HTH Dave If a Man is talking in the forest and there is no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?

Thank you for your quick response, Dave357, I entered the info from the new hd in cmos, still didnt work that is why i went to auto detect. I really would rather use the original hd but i keep getting the same messages, If i put the original hd in my system what changes do i make to the cmos? I have a compaq win98 3d processor 248 mb ram. the cmos is alot different than on the pb486. Can I install Win95 from my sys to the other hd? (I dont have setup for 98 only 95) Can I download the driver for the cd rom from my system? New Guy I have checked all of the cables and connections and all are ok, Is the BIOS update something I set or something I need to install, not sure about that one? I can hear all drives spin when power up, never have got fix disk error messages. Just the 2 beeps which my understanding is means parity error in first 64kb of memory Again thanks so much for all your help janet

Janet, re-install the original HD, after first copying down (from the HD's label) the number of Cylinders, etc. Be sure that the cables are installed correctly...red stripe on the ribbon cable goes to pin 1...usually next to the power cable.Set the CMOS to AUTO(detect) the HD. If it fails, change the setting to User and manually enter the information that you copied from the label. Save Changes & Exit, rebooting with a bootdisk...preferably one from the Operating System that you intend on installing. You can obtain bootdisks here. After booting with the bootdisk, at the A:\> prompt type fdisk (enter). Select Y to Large Disk Support (unless installing Win95 original version or Win95A). Select Option 4--Display Partition Information. This will tell you if there are any partitions defined. If not, esc your way back to the main fdisk menu & select Option 1--Create Primary DOS Partition. Follow the prompts to create the partition, rebooting when prompted. After rebooting, you'll need to format the newly formed partition by typing format C: (enter). Post back when you've gotten this far. HTH Dave If a Man is talking in the forest and there is no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?

Going by the original message. Now that I think about it, there's a couple of things going on. Do you happen to know the size of the original hard disk? Try going into the CMOS and manually entering the drive's criteria (Heads, Cylinders, Sectors, etc.) That stuff should be on the drive itself (the label on the cover. The "User Defined" option will let you do this. The CMOS autodetect feature for the hdisk doesn't always work so great. As for the CD-ROM, try setting it up as a slave to the original hard drive and rebooting. You can also set it up as a master on the secondary IDE channel. I don't think the CD-ROM drivers included on the Win98 startup disk were intended to identify CD-ROMS attached to a video or sound card. It might work better if the CD-ROM is on an IDE channel. If all goes well, the system should boot off the Win98 startup disk, providing the hard drive is all good. Win95 should install right from the command prompt.

Ok i reinstalled the original hd, set the cmos config, i also tried the cd rom on master 1 auto when i rebooted i got the following: adapter o master - change detected adapter 1 master - auto type failed system reconfigured failure fixed disk 1 reset the cmos without cd on master 1 and rebooted with boot disk started with cd rom support no driver found of course, anyway choose 4 and partition info is: partition: c: 1, status 1, type Pri Dos, Vol Label cd-rom, Mbytes 325, sys Fat16, Usage 100%, disk space is 325 mbytes, So I put format c: at the a prompt several times went to trying to recover allocation unit *****, at 81% and units 35,152 hd started making very loud noises and format was terminated.